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Title: Incomes of Arab-Americans in the United States, and in the Detroit Metropolitan Area
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2008
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Abstract: If America is a nation of immigrants, then the story of the country’s economic progress is very much the combined story of the progress of its numerous constituent immigrant groups. For reasons of national import as well as local interest, this paper will investigate the incomes of Arab-Americans. Our initial question asks if Arab-Americans earn more than the average American. It will be seen that this question must be re-stated; do foreign born Arab-Americans earn above average? While it is natural to analyze income differentials in terms of country of origin of the migrants, our goal is to explain these differentials in terms of more basic income determinants, such as gender, age, urban residence, and education. About thirty percent of the inhabitants of the city of Dearborn (a city adjacent to Detroit) claim Arab ancestry, so the comparison between the national data and the local situation is most attractive. 1 During 2003 a group of researchers affiliated with the University of Michigan conducted surveys (the DAAS) in the metropolitan area of Detroit relating to several aspects of the Arab-American population’s social and demographic characteristics.2 Coming soon after the 9/11 attacks, the social attitudes and experiences of this important group were the prime focus of the study. Although the level of household income was not a main focus of the DAAS study, it was recorded, and Baker et al. (2004, p. 9) comment on it that “Arabs and Chaldeans are disproportionately represented among the area’s wealthiest and poorest households.” They provide the following Graph DAAS, which shows that the distributional curve for the ArabAmericans and Chaldeans is flatter than for the general population. The graph also suggests a relatively similar level of average income between these two groups. This curious result, that this socio-geographically defined group would tend to concentrate at both ends of the income spectrum, was the initial motivation for this paper, which seeks to . . .
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Authors: Twomey, Michael
Publisher: University of Michigan, Dearborn
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Poverty and Welfare, Race and Ethnicity
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